I was going through residue of the collection of a Pratt & Whitney engineer who had very close association with some senior people at both Colt and High Standard. This goes back to the 70s and 80s or earlier. Mixed in a plastic bag of cartridge key-chains was this DI 44 9MM headstamped case and note.
Cheers,
Lew

Very interesting picture. Thanks for posting. Obviously from the “T” series of High Standard pistols from, as I recall, the late 1940s. Maybe part of that whole series of cartridges with various experimental projectiles made for the High Standards. An item like this is a “keeper” for sure. Congratulations on the find!

Dutch - I don’t know about the date the “@” sign came in. I also have
no way to know when the label was written. While as usual, I did not make
myself clear, I was referring to the firing of the case and the “T-3” series of
experimental 9 mm Pistols, originating in 1947 and last tested in the early
1950s, as I recall.

There were many barrels for the test pistols, as they experimented with various
ways to reduce what evidently was horrendous recoil for a 9 mm pistol, and also
with various rates of twists and bore diameters to accommodate the Army’s T-117-E
series of cartridges with various shapes and weights of sintered iron and plain steel.
These were first made by Remington I believe. I have a box from Remington for the
T-117-E-1 (Type A) supplied to the U.S. Army for testing. Stephen Fuller had one
of these pistols years ago, and it came with 17 (yes, 17!) extra barrels, each one of
different specifications.

To reduce recoil, High Standard finally copied a feature from a Mann 6.35 mm auto pistol,
and put various grooves in test-barrel chambers. I think we can see the evidence of that
cartridge case with the tag having been fired in such a barrel.

The tag could have been written much later than the firing of that case. Again, I don’t know, but at any rate, again, I was not referring to the date of the tag when I mentioned the 1940s.

According to the internet, which we all know is never wrong, The symbol “@” has been around a long time!

The origin of the symbol itself, one of the most graceful characters on the keyboard, is something of a mystery. One theory is that medieval monks, looking for shortcuts while copying manuscripts, converted the Latin word for “toward”—ad—to “a” with the back part of the “d” as a tail. Or it came from the French word for “at”—à—and scribes, striving for efficiency, swept the nib of the pen around the top and side. Or the symbol evolved from an abbreviation of “each at”—the “a” being encased by an “e.” The first documented use was in 1536, in a letter by Francesco Lapi, a Florentine merchant, who used @ to denote units of wine called amphorae, which were shipped in large clay jars.https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-accidental-history-of-the-symbol-18054936/

Gentlemen - thanks for all the information about the symbol @, I was confident it was a lot older than the 1970s, as I seem to recall even using it in High School in the 1950s. However, I did not have sources at hand to verify any date, so left it at “I don’t know about the date the “@” sign came in.” The above research you guys did is important in that it indicates that tag could have been put on the fired case contemporary to the T-3 pistol/T-117-E cartridge experiments. In fact, it likely was.

Lew - as far as I am concerned, you made a great posting with that picture of the case and tag. It might seem mundane at first, but the simple truth is, it brought forth good information on the T-3 Pistols, its problems, and High Standard’s solutions for some of them. Interesting stuff and while this is a cartridge forum, considerations of the pistols for the T-117-E cartridges is important to our knowledge of the ammunition for them.